My weight, those sneers, and my ex-husband's adultery

By REBECCA HARDY, Daily Mail

When Anne Diamond agreed to take part in Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother, she went out and bought a huge hooded dressing gown; blue and shaped much like a Victorian bathing tent, it covered her from head to toe.

'I was deliberately careful about the clothes I took in,' she says. 'I knew people would pick on me for my weight, which is why I really thought a lot about my wardrobe. I'm a size 18 and I'm not happy about being the size I am. I'm not naturally a fat person; I'm a thin person and at the moment I've got a weight problem.

'I knew on Big Brother I'd have to go to the loo, get undressed and into my pyjamas, go from the bathroom to the bedroom and get into bed without showing too much of myself.

'Because of the cameras, you also have to go to sleep looking nice. The first night I tried going under the duvet completely. It was so hot I thought I was going to die of heat, but I was determined not to throw off the covers. I was conscious all the time of my size.'

Anne hates being fat. 'If you'd told me 20 years ago I'd be this weight, I'd have died,' she says.

Today, she's wearing black slacks and a long taupe- coloured jumper that covers her bottom. In the flesh, she's as large as she appeared on screen, but much prettier. She's also funny, warm and quick-witted.

When she entered the Celebrity Big Brother house, she did so to a widelyfelt amalgam of admiration and pity. Everyone wondered what on earth had happened to the television presenter once described as 'elfin'. She knew it would be so, but still she went ahead.

'I went on because I was asked. I sat down with friends and said: "What's the worst they can say about me?"' she says. 'I thought they can say: (a) I'm boring and (b) I'm fat. All my friends said, all right, yes they will go for your weight.

BUT I thought it would be a one-off. I have been surprised by the continuing level of it. In a funny way, appearing on Big Brother has been liberating. I've actually been on the most exposing television programme there is.

'When I was first asked, my immediate reaction was: "For God's sake, no." Then I started to think - would it be the right thing to do or not?

'My agent saw it as an opportunity for people to get to know the real me. Producers have this idea that I'm very hard, very bossy. My image is of Little Miss Perfect and the fact that I'm more grown-up makes me more difficult. I am actually a very laid-back person.

'And my kids were so keen for me to do it. They called it "cool". I asked myself: "Am I cool enough to do it?" And I thought: "Yes, I think I am actually." I also thought it might be worse not to do it. I might have turned on the television at home and been thinking: "I could have done that."'

Since Anne's eviction from the house, her telephone has hardly stopped ringing. Media chums from years back have phoned out of the blue to pat her on the back. Her agent's phone is also constantly busy.

Anne Diamond is hot again and is clearly enjoying herself. She has read the many newspaper articles written about her during her time in the house.

Not all the comments have been kind, particularly following the Channel 4 montage of her seven-day stay in the house which showed her with a drink hand in every shot. 'Who doesn't enjoy a stiff drink and some chocolate now and then?' she says.

'Certainly most women I know do. The montage was funny, but I didn't realise the momentum it had gained. I don't actually drink that much.

'Housemates are invited to take a bottle of wine in with them, but I'm allergic to wine and beer so Big Brother let me take in half a bottle of Bacardi, and even then I shared it with the others.

'That lasted for three days so I was gasping for a drink occasionally. At home I drink only two or three times a week because I'm very busy in the evenings with the kids, driving them to judo or rock climbing classes.

'One or two evenings when we sit in and watch TV, I'll have a Bacardi and coke and a bag of peanuts. But I'm not this sad, depressed person who's sitting here comforting myself with food and drink. I'm very happy with my life at the moment.

Anne is a passionate mother who protects her sons with ferocious determination.

'Motherhood is not a retreat. I enjoy it. I see it as a career. It's as though to be happy as a divorcee, you've got to have another boyfriend and you've got to look gorgeous.

'I've committed the appalling sin of being overweight and not having a man, therefore I've got to be unhappy - and it's not true.'

Anne has not had a boyfriend since her acrimonious divorce from agent Mike Hollingsworth three years ago. 'Once bitten badly, twice shy,' she says. Hollingsworth cheated on her with Virgin Radio DJ Harriet Scott. He blamed the breakdown of their marriage on her inability to get over the dreadfully sad cot death of their four-monthold son, Sebastian.

He revealed they'd turned off the baby alarm to make love the night their son died.

At the time, Anne described his revelation as 'beneath contempt'. It was then that her weight started to balloon and she retreated increasingly from the media spotlight.

'I honestly don't think any of this has got anything to do with Sebastian,' says Anne. 'It's not at all. I think I'm wellrounded enough to have been able to cope with Sebastian's death and still build it into a healthy family life.

'Of course, I felt guilt for a while. It's a natural grief reaction

'As his mother I thought: "Why couldn't I have saved him? Why couldn't I have known something awful was going to happen? Why couldn't I have felt it in the air and known, instinctively, something was wrong?"

'What Mike said about the baby alarm is true. We did turn it off, but I turned it on again afterwards. The truth is it wouldn't have made any difference to his death.

'I've said before I don't think one infidelity is a cause for divorce, but I do think determined infidelity is. There was betrayal and disloyalty.

'After a while, a certain amount of stuff becomes unforgivable and when too much is unforgivable, you can't build a future on that.

'I sometimes feel very sad about everything that has happened. Did he love me as the TV presenter? I don't think I'll ever know. But it doesn't make me sad any more.

'I did start to comfort eat during the divorce and in the few years leading up to it. But I can truly say the hurting stopped about a year afterwards and Mike stopped mattering to me about a year ago.

'Mike was around me for a very long time and had a great influence on the way I thought about things and did things,' she says.

'I've had to find out who I am without him. Self- esteem gets knocked very badly in a divorce. It would be no great surprise to any "ologist" that I put on weight because my self-esteem wasn't the most important thing.'

Anne chooses her words carefully when she speaks of her former husband. He is, after all, her children's father and they love him. She doesn't.

Privately, friends of the couple describe Hollingsworth as a 'manipulative bastard'.

Mike was, indeed, a Svengali figure to Anne.

He fell in love with her when she was a young TV reporter and moulded much of her career. He pushed her constantly and she became pretty much an industry upon which the Hollingsworth-Diamond household depended.

I've known Mike for many years and, while he doubtless loved Anne very much at one time, he was also hugely ambitious for her. She was his wife, but she was also the talent.

If she put on a few pounds, he told her so and when, following Sebastian's death, she wanted more children, he wanted her to focus on her career.

She decided to get pregnant without telling him and he sulked with her for weeks. I have always felt that her absolute retreat into motherhood and ballooning weight was a rebellion of sorts when he dumped her so cruelly.

'I'm very cross that anyone thinks it's a failure to be focused back on the home,' she says.

'I think it's actually quite important for a woman to be looking after kids, making a nest. At one time I was working flat out and the only way you could run me as an industry was to have staff.

'I had as many as six: a gardener, a housekeeper, a weekend housekeeper and three nannies. It was crazy. I remember so often I was running from pillar to post and having to keep in touch with the children via nannies. I was paying them to do the thing I wanted to be doing.

'It was genuinely upsetting me working so hard and being away from my kids. I'm a natural homemaker. Eventually I put my foot down.

'I spend much of my life protecting my kids. When I decided to go on to Big Brother I was very, very careful making sure I'd laid battle plans.

'The longest I'd been away from the kids was three days when I did a documentary for GMTV, and that was before I was a single mother.

'At one time I was thinking about taking in a little mobile phone. I was really panic-stricken about not being able to talk to them.

'I thought things might get silly while I was away - that things might fall out of control and this carefully ticking clock might throw a spring while I was away and the only person who could fix it was me.'

Anne persuaded the programmemakers to contact her children's nanny on a daily basis and provide her with a daily bulletin.

'I made them promise that the bulletin would be honest and sincere. I wanted them to tell me about anything that might damage my children's happiness - if my nanny went ill or if her mother went ill and that affected her looking after the children.

'Every morning they gave me a little private message: "Big Brother has spoken to your nanny and the children are fine."'

When Anne was finally evicted from the Big Brother house, her children, Oliver, 15, Jamie, 13, Jake, eight, and seven-year-old Conor, told her she was 'cool'. It was an enormously happy moment, but one that was almost ruined.

For, Hollingsworth had brought along his incredibly young stickthin partner Kimberley Stewart-Mole, who is 33 years his junior. Anne's sister Louise Hamilton-Welsh told her to leave.

'It would have been awful to come out of the house to be greeted by people who weren't my family.

'I have struggled to find myself and realised you've got to learn to love yourself before anyone else will. I am comfortable with myself now and with who I am.

'I've moved house, bought my own home and I love every corner of it.

FOR a long time I'd hidden myself because I was ashamed of my weight. I put on a few pounds, hated myself for it and carried on eating. When I look in the mirror I hate what I see.

'If I was going to a function I'd agonise for ages over what to wear and what dress would fit. Everytime I went up a dress size I'd tell myself it was just temporary - but it wasn't.

'Now I don't feel ashamed. I don't care what people say and the headlines haven't hurt me. I've reached a stage where I think: "Sod what people think." Which is good for me. I used to be too uptight to think like that.

'Now I feel liberated. I can still be attracted to men. I've seen one or two in the last year of whom I've thought: 'Um, yeah.' When the time is right, I've no doubt I'll meet someone - I'm still in full working order and my sister assures me that as one loses weight one's libido perks up no end.

'I went on Celebrity Big Brother and came out into the open,' she says. 'People have started talking about me as me again and it's made me think: "Yes, I am a person. Maybe I ought to take a bit of care of me."

'My mother would say: "I've been telling you that for years." The past few years have been a struggle. Emotionally, I've been on a bit of a rollercoaster. When you put on weight you start to not like yourself and you don't treat yourself to the self-discipline that you need.

'My weight is the last thing I've got to tidy up. I've shoved it to one side to deal with other things.

'I think now is the time to deal with it and Big Brother may be a turning point from that point of view.'